“Open as Web Folder” Not In the Internet Explorer 8 File | Open dialog

David Conner here. I am a Senior Escalation Engineer on the IE Core and SDK team in Microsoft Support. If you’ve installed the IE 8 Beta builds or the Released build and tried to open a WebDAV share via the File | Open dialog, you may have notice that the checkbox to “Open as Web Folder” is no longer in the dialog as it was in IE 7 and previous versions of IE. In IE 7 we did a bit of work to separate Internet Explorer from the Windows Shell. This work is described in the KB article at this here (KB928675). Below are comparisons between the IE 8 and IE 7 Open Dialogs:

IE 8 Open Dialog

IE 7 Open Dialog

You can still open Web Folders in Explorer. One way to do this on Windows Vista is to

1) Click Start

2) Click Computer

3) In the following dialog click Map Network Drive

4) On the Map Network Drive dialog, click "Connect to a Web site that you can use to store your documents and Pictures" this will pop up the "Welcome to the Add Network Location Wizard".

Thanks for the article. What about on Windows XP SP3 for PC’s in a Domain – have you found a workaround there? Initially, this strikes me as a pretty big flaw. I have a lot users accessing remote shares via Web Folders.

I have noticed that even that the "Open as Web Folder" checkbox is not there now, it is possible to render a WebDAV collection using JavaScript. The following snippet works in IE5.5-IE7 but it in IE8 it does not if the port is other than 80.

Thanks for this. I was just setting up 3 laptops and went to grab our AV software off our internal page only to NOT find the usual webfolder option. Your suggestion was right on. I wonder why the chose to remove that option?

I haven’t seen any follow-up from this post, but while adding the web folder to the network locations allows this to be opened through direct user interaction with Explorer, it does not allow for a web folder to be opend via a URL in IE8. Any attempt to do this currently displays the "default view" in IE8 which does not support the WebDAV extensions. It appears that the transportation between IE8 and Explorer for URL’s with the "folder" attribute is no longer available. There was a post on 4/16 regarding a similar issue when attempting to open an FTP URL where the fix was to modify the ie.ftp classes registry to invoke Explorer instead of IE. Could there be a similar fix for web folders?

Is there any way to open a web folder and pass along different credentials than one is logged in as?

Basically, we’d like to connect to a normal WebDAV server end point and pass along user credentials through normal HTTP basic auth and we can’t seem to get this to work on an XP / IE8 machine. We’ve tried going into "my network places" and do it there but that doesn’t seem to work either the way one would expect.

I do not want a new network location, I want a drive letter mapped to a network location (such as a moss list) so that I can reference it using a drive letter not the fully qualified URL which IMO is very bulky.

I do have to apologize for my response to this. I was able to map the drive to a drive letter using the fully qualified URL. However, it is not very apparent that this is the new way of doing things under IE8: maybe a post or additional details in this post stating that you can still map the drive letter would be helpful to others. Just a thought.

"On a web page, IE8 only opens links to web folders using the WebDAV client redirector. It will not try to use the alternative Web Publishing component that comes installed with Office and supports HTTPS, like old IE6 & IE7."

We used to have WebDAV client redirector disabled since it is so boring, slow and complex for the users, nut now we have to enable it (as default) on all client machines.

Why is WebDAV client redirector so much slower than Web Publishing component that comes installed with Office?

We use Livelink drag&drop which is very usefull when working with a webbased document management system.

And we use the webdav over https also.

Both become useless with IE8.

This makes us to stick with IE7 and therefor with Win XP. There is no way we are going to switch to Vista and Windows comes with IE8..

In stead of just removing the ‘open as web folder’ functionality we would have loved to see additional functionality in Vista and Windows 7 to map webdav drives over https! That would be very valuable!

I don’t know what to say – just as webdav is dying, our university is moving TO it and discontinuing other access… sweet. I just got the notice that, over Christmas break, we now have to use webdav to access our files from off campus. I’m just researching what might be needed to make it work.

And no, they’re not going to remove html rendering from IE… in fact I heard they’ve just hired a bunch of unemployed experts from some rendering plants that have just closed down.

If you’re having trouble with webdav over SSL try the ‘\<server>@SSL<path>’ syntax. Not sure if this works on xp or not but on windows 7 with IE8 if I navigate to this unc path it opens up in explorer with no need to map a drive letter.

We use SharePoint 2007 and are almost all the way converted to IE8. I have found that I cannot connect to web folders on Windows Server 2003 machines that have IE8 (either through the "map network drive" or via the "Connect with Windows Explorer" option of SharePoint. very frustrating…..

This is pretty broken. It appears that the FOLDER= attribute for the anchor tag is also broken in IE7.

I’ve tried the patches in KB907306 and it does not fix the issue, even though the dll’s were older than what came with that package.

The web server hasn’t changed in quite a while.

I have validated that XP with IE6 DOES still work with the folder= attribute.

This is just sadly broken. It’s a major piece of functionality that is now just gone.

WebDAV is an IETF standard; I understand making IE8 more HTML compliant would seem to be a good thing, but MS should have forced the IETF to list the WebDAV syntax as a valid attribute. It was pretty usefull.

To use the Add Network Place Wizard to add a shortcut to your computer that allows you to upload and access files in Resources using WebDAV

■On the desktop, double-click My Network Places.

■In the “Network Tasks” pane, click Add a network place.

■On the welcome screen, click Next.

■Select Choose another network location, and then click Next.

■In the “Internet or network address:” field, enter a URL that points to the destination Resources tool.

\serveripfoldername

You may now drag and drop folders between your computer and the sites to which you just connected. However, you cannot delete items from a site by dragging them to the Recycle Bin on your desktop. To delete an item, right-click it and select Delete.

Dude, this only works for me if I'm ACTUALLY ON THE NETWORK that I'm connecting to. The purpose of the web folder is that I can access my stuff from elsewhere. How do I get my webfolder that isn't "read-only"? FAIL FAIL FAIL!

Dude, this only works for me if I'm ACTUALLY ON THE NETWORK that I'm connecting to. The purpose of the web folder is that I can access my stuff from elsewhere. How do I get my webfolder that isn't "read-only"? FAIL FAIL FAIL!

Hi please update this post with instructions on how to do this on XP using IE 8. There are a lot of old Microsoft docs and kbs that use this method, XP and IE, as one of the crucial steps in troubleshooting their products. Last I saw XP was still a supported MS product. So now quite a few troubleshooting docs and kb's are broken. Please also update the related kb articles. Using this method to troubleshoot EAS does not work and is not a viable solution.

Hi please update this post with instructions on how to do this on XP using IE 8. There are a lot of old Microsoft docs and kbs that use this method, XP and IE, as one of the crucial steps in troubleshooting their products. Last I saw XP was still a supported MS product. So now quite a few troubleshooting docs and kb's are broken. Please also update the related kb articles. Using this method to troubleshoot EAS does not work and is not a viable solution.

Great, another once-existent feature no longer supported by Windows. Isn't functionality supposed to go in the other direction? This is the second reminder today of why my open source stack at home is choice.

Great, another once-existent feature no longer supported by Windows. Isn't functionality supposed to go in the other direction? This is the second reminder today of why my open source stack at home is choice.